[quote who="Kalin" reply="35" id="2780968"]He never said anything about Elemental being better than either.[/quote] No, but he made a post-hoc rationalization for his purchase of Elemental based on a ridiculous premise (that Civ 5's score was lower than Civ 4, which he hated). His posts have all the hallmarks of buyer's remorse. He is attempting to resolve his cognitive dissonance over this mistake by attacking Civ 5.
[quote who="wayninja" reply="33" id="2780936"]By this logic, doesn't that mean Civ V is better than Civ IV? Since you feel elemental is better and it got a lower score?[/quote] It's rare to find valid logic in post-hoc rationalizations (and other ego defense mechanisms).
[quote who="GaelicVigil" reply="27" id="2780783"]Wow, worse than Civ 4 (9.4) - a game I hated with a passion. This is good news, it means I spent my money wisely on Elemental.[/quote] What on earth does the Civ 4 score have to do with whether Elemental is worth the money or not? You sound like someone who is experiencing some severe cognitive dissonance.
[quote who="Tridus" reply="18" id="2633083"] If you go by that metric, World of Warcraft is the least popular and most broken game in the history of games. Blizzard's community is so huge that people primarily tend to post when they want to complain about something. It's also so huge that no matter what is done, you will have ten thousand people decrying how terrible it is. You even see cases where the forums "unanimously" want something, and Blizzard does it.
[quote who="Grove12345" reply="12" id="2632628"]Hate to bring in MoM system, but that game did ALOT of things right.[/quote] Why the hate? If something is done right, it'd be pretty stupid to change it just for change's sake. This is the one thing that has me worried about the game. That changes are being made for their own sake without regard for whether it'll improve the game or not. My one comfort is that the game will probably be moddable enough for me to realize m
[quote who="TCores" reply="9" id="2632416"]The fun thing about computers is we can do extremely complicated and awesome battle systems if we want - they can do all the heavy lifting math.[/quote] The problem with that is that people need to be able to understand what is going on. If you are doing highly complicated simulations that are difficult for the human player to understand you ruin the playability of the game. [quote who="John_Hughes" reply="10" id="26324
The MoM system is the best. Civilization's system is totally retarded. Barring withdrawal chances, 1 side is guaranteed to die every battle. This made it impossible to keep a strong unit alive for long periods of time as there is always a small chance he will die.
Living lairs? Like in Master of Magic?
It's fine to say all this, but to codify it in an AI routine is entirely another matter. A lot of this stuff involves qualitative analysis which is extremely difficult for an AI to do.
Why reinvent the wheel? MoM's system of no race mixing is the simplest and makes the most sense strategically. When you capture a city, it maintains its race. Any units built at that city maintain that race. Building a settler at any city produces a settler of that race, allowing you to found new cities of that race. This simple system gives you a great deal of power and flexibility, allowing you to build armies of unique units from many different races.
[quote who="Luckmann" reply="23" id="2601291"]That doesn't mean that the concept of religion in games is flawed, though. The outlook that "starting wars for religion" is flawed - historically, politics dictated religion, not the other way around. The AI should choose religion based on what is optimal to their tactic. Their tactic shouldn't be dictated by their religion - otherwise you get these stupid situations where the AI arbitrarily cripples itself. It feels like they're throwi
[quote who="MagicwillNZ" reply="17" id="2601093"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 2NOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Let the modders handle that kind of thing. Quoting ChongLi, reply 16 They did scrap religion in Civ 5, however. [/quote] Yeah, they decided that it made the AI behave too randomly and in a non-optimal fashion. Attacking another Civ based only on religious differences may be a "realistic" thing to do
[quote]I wouldn't say it caused Civ to fail.[/quote] They did scrap religion in Civ 5, however.
Non-real-time simultaneous turns is not something I'd be a fan of. It's simply too difficult to execute your turns because you have to plan all of your moves for the turn in advance (you aren't able to react to anything until the next turn).
Zones of Control don't make much sense in a game where combats are resolved tactically rather than strategically.
I agree with most of your points but I have to take issue with some of them. [quote]Can never get everything... not bad, but annoying that after a point (all nodes cleared) you are unable to ever gain the ability to gain another retort... so it could be turn 100,000 and you still can't cast web... although it functions to increases replayability. Makes little sense for non-conflicting magic schools... why if you can cast the spell of mastery are you unable to throw a fireball? (you ca
And cycles are no longer an issue with the latest DosBox emulation core. The game now runs amazingly well on it.
Some interesting ideas there. I hope you are planning to do a mod with all of them, sounds like it could be pretty cool. [e digicons]B)[/e]
[quote]Ice shield should be totally ineffective against lightning, since water is conductive.[/quote] Water is not conductive. It's the dissolved ions that are conductive. Pure deionized water does not conduct electricity. I'm just going out on a limb here, but I think magically created water or ice would not include magically dissolved calcium and sodium ions. [quote]It should cancel out the fire storm but be destroyed since the firestorm would cancel it out. Any ice attacks
[quote]A unit of 1000 will be somewhat ordered as one, but will still be 1000 individual units.[/quote] A unit of 1,000 is not the same as 1,000 individual units, it is 1 unit. It is no different from the "BC" unit from Master of Orion. 1 BC was 1 Billion Credits. So what? You could only make use of them in minimum 1 BC denominations. For all intents and purposes, 1 BC is no different from 1 credit or 1 gold or whatever, it's just a silly label. Same thing with units. Tack a 1
[quote]Counter spelling in NWN was incredibly useful in multiplayer if your team was coordinated. One sorc would stack up every dispel of every kind and lock onto an enemy caster, preventing him from casting anything, since dispel counters any spell. Meanwhile your buddys would beat the caster to a pulp while he was being countered.[/quote] Ahh. The concept of more than 2 sides in a battle would definitely throw this whole debate out the window, as magic would have to be severely tone
[quote]Ah, didn't catch that it was basically dnd, but i recall a couple games that work like this.[/quote] My experience with this system comes from Neverwinter Nights. The big problem I had with it is that I pretty much never found a good reason to counter the spell. It was almost always more useful to save my own spell instead of wasting it on the counter. [quote]And perhaps spells are not instant cast, but take a turn or two to cast which would allow time for counters or s
[quote]Are you on crack? 11 sorcery books makes the early game cake. Spam phantom warriors. They are like 8 mana to cast if you have 11 sorc books.[/quote] You can't evaluate balance at all when looking at any strategy against MoM's AI. MoM is easy to win with 0 spellbooks. If you could play MoM in multiplayer against another player, phantom warriors would be easy to counter because they are so slow and vulnerable to ranged attacks. [quote]And for the individual counter spells
Heh, reading everyone's ideas together confuses the hell out of me. To those wondering whether MoM's system is balanced? I think it is, in a general sense. To really appreciate the balance of MoM's system you have to realize the inherent tradeoffs in it. If you focused exclusively on sorcery (11 blue books) you had a very weak early game. Sure, you had a lot of different ways to counter the enemy's spells but that meant you'd spend all your time researching these instead of resea
One of the core balancing mechanics in Master of Magic is the spellcasting skill stat. This stat directly determines how quickly you can spend your mana on spells. If your spellcasting skill is 50, you may spend no more than 50 mana per turn on out-of-combat spells (and 50 pre-channeling mana per combat). Lets say you want to cast Armageddon, which costs 1250 mana, it will take you 25 turns to cast it (at 50 mana/turn). Anyone who is currently running the Detect Magic spell&